XRP Price vs Ripple's Growth: What the 2016 Emails Really Show

On October 12th, a man who's held XRP since 2017 sat down in front of his camera and said, "All of that junk that was supposed to cause a moonshot, all of it happened and the price did nothing. He hasn't sold a single coin and after almost 10 years, he said he only wants one thing from XRP." In quotes, "Show me something."

All of that junk that was supposed to cause a moonshot, all of it happened and it did bumpkus, nothing. I only want XRP to do one thing. Show me something.

More than 170,000 people watched that video and if you hold XRP, you know his list by heart. When the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple, the company behind XRP, ended in August of 2025, XRP jumped about 11% that day and was about 13% lower a month later. The first spot XRP ETF fund then launched, which holds a coin for you inside of a normal brokerage account. It opened November 2025 and took in around $250 million on day one and the price fell that same day. And the gentleman in that video said he bought it himself.

Now, at the time of recording this video, XRP is around $1.25, which is about 66% below its July 2025 high and it makes absolutely no sense when you had all of the positive catalysts for the company Ripple and even for XRP. So, when people tell the man in that video that it's going to go to like $100 or $1,000, he asks one question, based on what? And by the end of this video, you'll have the answer and know how to set up what you own so you get paid when XRP finally moves. And the first thing this community blames is the one Ripple's own emails prove is half true. So, we're going to dive into that into this video.

And if you're here to build real wealth, protect what's yours, and be the one to change your family's future, hit the subscribe button and comment bullish below. Now, let's dive into the video.

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Welcome back to the Bull Runners YouTube channel. If you're new here, my name is Paul, and you can find me on Twitter or X at Crypto Paul. So, let's start with the suppression story because it's the one I hear from this community the most, and part of it holds up. In February of 2021, the SEC put a 2016 email chain from inside Ripple into a federal court filing. Ripple's finance chief suggested telling the company's market maker, which is the trading firm that sold Ripple's coins on exchanges, to adjust down a bit our net sell target for a few days to see if we can help stabilize and or increase the XRP price.

And Chris Larsen, Ripple's co-founder, wrote back, "Yes, let's adjust it." So, the company that made the coin was deciding between themselves in an email chain how much to sell so the price would behave. And in all fairness, in many cases, the selling hasn't stopped, otherwise the price would be up, but it's not since that July 2025 high because on the first of every month, 1 billion XRP comes out of escrow, which was set up in 2017 by Ripple, and most of it gets locked back up. But, over the last 12 months, about 3.6 billion coins stayed out, which works out to about 300 million new coins per month. And Ripple still controls about 38 billion of the 100 billion XRP that will ever exist, almost 9 years after that escrow was set up. And every coin it releases cost it nothing to make.

It was just a few lines of code, which means the demand is what made this thing valuable, not the code itself. Sure, we have some beautiful things inside of the protocol when it comes to security, but it's kind of like if you put a major oasis in the middle of the desert. If no one is there to enjoy it or use it, does it really matter? Now, on top of that, 11.81 billion XRP was sitting on exchanges in mid-October, which is the most in a single year, which means 15 billion dollars of XRP coins can be sold within a single click. Now, Ripple will have coins to sell for years, and if they sold it all at once, that would be quite foolish because that'll hurt the largest asset on their balance sheets.

So, from a fiscally responsible perspective, that's not really smart. And so, this is where the suppression story might have legs. A lot of people talk about how XRP is being suppressed, but we have to remember that every time XRP rallies, those are some coins that the team has that can sell off into those rallies because they essentially got them for free. But, Ripple owned an even bigger share of the supply in 2017 when almost nothing had been built and XRP still went to a record high because people wanted the coin faster than Ripple could sell it. And Bitcoin has had plenty of big sellers, too, and it still set a record above 126,000 in October of 2025 because the demand was greater than the supply, hence why people bid the price up.

So, the selling explains why XRP can't run fast, but it can't explain a drop this big on its own, which means the buyers never even showed up. So, any amount of selling can push the price down. You need a constant stream of steady buying in order for the price to go up. But, if there's just even a short, or I should say a small, amount of selling that enters exchanges, but there are very few buyers, price will go down. And so, this explains why some of the best news we saw all last year in 2025 for XRP almost did nothing for the token, and it continued dumping for new local lows.

While Ripple the company itself had some of the best developments and expansion it's ever had. Now, quick thing before we get to Ripple as a company. Every time the Altcoin Pro Accelerator fills up and we close, somebody writes us months later, usually after the prices have already moved, and they wanted some guidance or help, or to be involved in our private intelligence network, they shoot us an email that asks us if they can still get in. But, it's important to know we can only take a few new people each month because we do help our clients one-on-one, and there's just too many people and not enough of us. So, you can find out more about that program by clicking on the link at the very top of the description while there's still room.

Now, let's get back to Ripple's best year. By any normal measure, Ripple the company is winning. It raised $500 million at a $40 billion valuation back in November of 2025. And by March, it was buying back its own shares at a price that valued it at $50 billion. It spent nearly $3 billion buying other companies, including the $1.25 billion of Hidden Road, which is now considered or called Ripple Prime, which is a firm that lends money and handles trades for big funds.

They spent another billion dollars for G Treasury, which makes software that big companies use to manage their cash. And Ripple's own stable coin, RLUSD, which is a coin that is meant to be pegged to the dollar one-for-one, grew from about 1.3 billion at the start of this year to 2.5 billion by October. In the same 10 months, XRP kept falling as a token. So, Ripple continued to grow while XRP declined. And every one of those numbers got sold to you as XRP news.

And as an XRP holder, you got paid nothing from any of them. You can't buy shares in Ripple when you buy XRP. So, that valuation belongs to the people who own the company, which is a private sale between accredited investors. And the businesses it bought mostly moved dollars and RLUSD. The man from the start of this video said it himself that Ripple making billions doesn't mean I make a cent as an XRP holder.

And some of the XRP news was never true at all. In January of 2025 with XRP around 240, a money manager went on Fox Business and told the whole country that Bank of America was running 100% of its internal transactions on XRP. Bank of America has never confirmed a single one of those transactions. And anyone who bought XRP that week is currently down 48%. Then Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple's CEO, said in February that XRP is the North Star for Ripple.

And I quote, "It's our purpose." And then he listed what Ripple is doing to back that up, which is its payments business, its trading and treasury businesses, custody, and RLUSD. The payments business is the one where XRP actually does a job. And even in that situation, XRP is only held for a few seconds that it takes to move money from one currency to another. And the fee that is taken from that is so minuscule and small, it won't really create a major portion of demand pushing the price up. Then in May of 2025, Ripple stopped publishing the quarterly report that showed what it did with its XRP.

And it wrote that Ripple's transparency has been used against the company, most notably by former SEC leadership. Now, think about that what you will, but it's better that we know exactly what Ripple is doing with XRP versus them having an excuse and pointing at the SEC. I understand that the SEC was to blame for many of the ills that were done to crypto and to Ripple. But less transparency is not better. Either way, Ripple, the company is now set up to keep growing without anyone needing to buy and hold XRP.

And this year, when new money came into crypto, most of it went somewhere else. So, let's follow that money because at the start of this year, XRP looked like the winner. In the first week of January, XRP was up more than 20% and CNBC told its viewers there was big money behind the trade.

The coin formerly known as Ripple soaring more than 20% this year becoming the third largest cryptocurrency out there and there's big money behind this trade.

Since the start of 2026, XRP is down 32% which is worse than Bitcoin at 12%. Solana at 24% and Ethereum at 25%. To this day, Bitcoin still holds a range of between 58 to 60% of market dominance which means it's the majority of the money in the market. While XRP is sitting at 3% of the total market. So, when new money comes in, it usually goes to Bitcoin first and then a lot of the rest of it sits in stable coins and then altcoins.

Now, one of those stable coins is Ripple's own RLUSD. So, a lot of the money people bring to Ripple sits in a coin that's always worth $1. And that doesn't necessarily push XRP's price at all. You do need to use XRP to send the RLUSD, but value sits in RLUSD and not in XRP when it comes to payments. Because when you're doing a lot of volume in payments, you don't want to be holding something that is as volatile that it can dump 32% over the month.

That said, the market also got pickier. In 2017, almost every coin with a logo went up at the same time for some insane gains. And this time, the money has moved from one story to the next. We call those narratives. In this case, we've seen it with privacy coins.

We've seen it with AI tokens and even exchange coins taking a turn while XRP waited for its own. But, that doesn't explain why none of Ripple's growth pulled money into the coin. And the answer to that comes from Brad Garlinghouse's own pitch. Garlinghouse summed up what XRP actually does in one sentence in May at XRP Las Vegas, which is a conference for XRP holders they usually hosted every year.

And so, what makes XRP so unique is its speed. Settling transactions in 3 to 5 [music] seconds. It's cost, extremely low cost, fractions of a penny per transaction. And its scalability. [music]

And he stated speed is XRP's biggest selling point. And it's also why the price is stuck, because a coin that does its job in 3 to 5 seconds isn't a coin that anyone actually has to hold. Now, a grocery store can have thousands of shoppers a day and only need a couple hundred carts, because every cart goes right back to the rack the moment someone's done with it. A bank moving money through XRP works the same way, because it buys the coins, holds it for a few seconds, and sells it to the other side. So, it can move billions of dollars through XRP without ever owning much XRP itself.

And again, they would do this because if you hold it for too long, you could experience some undesired volatility. The value of what you bought can go down. It's a tradeable asset that isn't pegged one-for-one to the US dollar. Hence why stable coins are so attractive and consistently growing in the space of crypto. And that's what the man from the start of this video worked out after almost 10 years of holding.

When he said that the same XRP can be potentially used again and again in minutes, maybe even within seconds. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, wrote this down in October of 2027. In the same month XRP was running to its record. His point was that a coin people used to pay for things is worth more the longer people keep it. And in his words, the market cap of an app coin depends crucially on the holding time.

And if you're new to crypto or investing, market cap simply means what all of the coins or shares of that asset are worth combined. And this community already watched it happen once. In 2018, Santander, one of the biggest banks in Europe, launched a payments app on Ripple's software. And the app didn't use the coin at all. Then from the highs of like 330 in 2017 to 2018, XRP fell down to 35 cents that year.

So, that's how a bank can use XRP every day while the holders don't really make a dime. Because holders only make money when somebody has a reason to hold the coin, not just use it. It also answers the question David Schwartz, who is one of the co-founders of XRP and the XRPL, that was asked on X back in May. He said, "If a very few rich, very few rational people believed XRP had an even 1% chance of hitting $10,000 in 10 years, they'd have already bid it up to $20." And asked the question, "Why haven't they?" And the answer is that a bank doesn't need to bid XRP up to $20 to use it for 5 seconds. And it leaves one question that anyone promise you, even a $100 XRP price owes you an answer to, which is who exactly has to hold the coin for it to get there.

Because while you hold it, someone else might have an incentive to sell it, especially if they got it at a far better price. Or even in the case of Ripple the company, free. Either way, we've had some really positive developments this last year for XRP in the case of buyers who actually want to hold the coin at a far larger scale. And that is the spot ETFs. These six spot ETF funds hold about 1.2 billion XRP between them, and they keep it for their investors.

Wall Street has put it close to about 1.8 billion, and by October 20th, that money was worth 1.5. So, even the big money that finally showed up is still losing on that trade currently. Then on October 12th of this year, Evernode, which is a company Ripple backs that exist to buy and hold XRP, listed on the Nasdaq holding 473 million XRP. So this is the first major sign of real demand that is in place to buy and hold the XRP token and somehow it still fell. Because even since the very first spot ETF fund happened, XRP is still down 48% and when Evernode listed XRP was sitting at about $1.41 and it's currently trading at 1.25, which means we still have more overhead selling.

We could say it's potentially a Ripple selling. We could say it's major investor selling. We could say it's the ETF selling. It's probably a combination of all of the above including retail investors who might have lost hope and bought somewhere in the highs of $2.00 and $3.00. And so with all of this buying, how is the price still going down?

The reason is size because everything the funds and Evernode hold put together is only about a seventh of the coins sitting on exchanges. While Ripple the company adds more to that circulating supply every single month. So when the holder at the beginning of this video asks, based on what, the answer is buyers who keep the coin because XRP pumps when those people are buying more of it than Ripple and the exchanges can sell. And no court win or bank rumor or conference changes that math. So until the actual demand becomes greater than the supply, XRP can remain at lower prices for longer than this community has been led to believe.

In other words, the money that you have in XRP does need a solid game plan that works for you while you wait for XRP to rally or pump, which could take a while. So let's talk about your XRP because back in 2017, I was where a lot of you are right now. I lost about 150 grand in that market and the exact number moved every day with the volatility. It was kind of gut-wrenching. What I took from it is that holding and hoping only works until the market decides it doesn't.

XRP might not do what you need it to do on your time frame or timeline. And so, because you don't control that timeline, you need a plan to survive in the case that it takes more years and more time than you reasonably thought before. And since new money goes usually to Bitcoin first, XRP doesn't move until Bitcoin does. So, here is my read. I think we are in a bull market.

And if that's the case, it's likely that Bitcoin moves before XRP. But because I think we're in for some turbulent waters ahead with a greater macro and equity sell-off, it's very much possible we see some more volatility to the downside. So, if anyone is taking on leveraged positions or on margin, they could possibly get wrecked or liquidated before the next major move up, which means you should have a plan and you should have some help in your corner from Experts Pro and a community that is as serious as you are. Because in the long run, I still am a believer in XRP. I just know the supply and demand economics, which means I like to be in at the right time and I like to start to sell a bit of that position when we start rolling over off a top.

Either way, just because I believe in a crypto like XRP doesn't mean I have all of it riding on one coin. This is why I diversify. And I actually even diversify outside of crypto. I think that's wise because sometime crypto is so tethered, all of the coins move in the exact same way. Even if one dumps 20%, the other dumps 30.

That is still a play in the same ballpark. I want to have money in multiple ballparks. I want to figure out what a good position is for me. And so, that's why I diversify outside of crypto as well. And so, that way even if crypto were to dump maybe 20 to 50% in the next week or month, I wouldn't get hurt too bad.

I wouldn't get wiped out. And most importantly, I knew when to take profit on the way up because the people who rode the 2018 high, most of them rode it all the way back down, and we call that round tripping. So, whatever XRP does next, the rest of what I own is doing a different job. So, when the market picks a story that isn't XRP, maybe it's something else like real-world assets or AI, my portfolio is still making progress. But if everything you own is in XRP because you have strong conviction, then your portfolio only makes progress when XRP is doing hot.

And in all honesty, it hasn't been doing too hot since mid-2025. So, no headline or social media you post you see online is going to change who's buying and selling XRP. The part you can control is how much of your money sits in it and what the rest is doing. And this is why I think it's so important that you click on that very first link down in the description below. If you're on mobile, you just click the more button, and that very first link will take you to a page that shows you how to join or get access to our private intelligence network so you get the right information about what's happening in the crypto market from pros and experts and world-class research team that does live calls all week long.

We're talking upwards of seven calls per week just to make sure that you're in the right place at the right time taking advantage of the right cryptos and positions. And most importantly, you know when to sell. If that sounds interesting to you and you want to learn more, be sure to click on that very first link down in the description below, and I will see you on the other side. But that is it for the video, folks. If you enjoyed it, be sure to subscribe to the channel, and I will see you in the next one.

Stay bullish, and goodbye.

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Woo!

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Woo! Woo!